When Monday Feels Like Drowning

Tags: [“Smartphone Alarm”, “Apple iPhone 15”, “NYC Office Commute”, “$0-10 Morning Spend”, “Monday Work Anxiety”]

At 6:18 a.m. on Monday, August 10, I was sitting on the bedroom floor of my Astoria apartment with one sock on, staring at my iPhone 15. The alarm had played “Radar” five times since 5:50. My roommate knocked and said, “Are you alive in there?”

“Define alive.”

“I mean, are you getting up?”

“I’m up.”

“You’re sitting on the floor.”

Up was generous. I had one hand wrapped around my ankle and the other pressed against my chest, like I could manually slow whatever was happening in there. It was only 6:18!

One sock, five alarms, and a mouthful of panic

I slept six hours and forty-one minutes according to my phone. That was not great, but it also was not zero. I had closed my laptop at 11:56 p.m., washed my face, filled my water bottle, and put out a clean shirt like someone who had her life handled.

Then I lay awake thinking about a 14-slide deck.

Nothing in that deck could hurt me. I knew that. It contained three bar charts, one budget table, and a typo I had already fixed on Friday. Still, every time I closed my eyes, I saw slide six with its orange comment bubble: “Can we make this more actionable?”

What did that even mean at midnight?

In the kitchen, I poured oat milk into a mug before noticing I had not made coffee. My roommate watched the pale liquid hit the empty ceramic and slowly put down her spoon.

“You went to bed before twelve. Why are you wrecked?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

At 6:31, I opened Notes and typed “monday drowning.” I deleted it because it sounded dramatic. Then I typed it again because what else was I meant to call the feeling of waking up already behind, already apologizing, already desperate for the day to release me?

I had not even left my apartment, and my stomach was tightening.

I knew the list. Shower. Clothes. Train. Coffee. Desk. Meeting. None of it was new. I had done versions of that Monday for three years, right down to checking the weather while brushing my teeth and discovering toothpaste on the black shirt I had planned to wear.

But that morning, each tiny action had weight. Pulling on jeans felt like hauling wet fabric over a body that had forgotten how to stand. Choosing earrings felt ridiculous, so I wore none and then worried that my bare face made me look unprepared.

I changed shirts twice. I hated both.

The downtown N train was already full

At 7:14, I left my building with my laptop tote cutting into my right shoulder. August humidity had glued my bangs to my forehead before I reached the corner of 30th Avenue. A delivery truck hissed beside the curb, and the air smelled like hot pavement, sesame bagels, and yesterday’s trash.

The guy at the deli looked at me and said, “Long weekend?”

“Not long enough.”

He laughed. I tried to.

I paid $4.75 for an iced coffee at the deli on 30th Avenue. I watched the card reader spin for three beats and became convinced my payment would decline, even though I had checked my account in bed. When the green check appeared, my palms were still sweating.

At 7:29, I reached the subway platform. I tapped through the turnstile. I heard the train before I saw it. I moved toward the yellow line. I stepped back when the wind punched through the tunnel. The doors opened. I squeezed beside a woman holding a silver lunch container. My tote hit someone’s knee. I said, “Sorry.” He did not look up. I found half a seat. The coffee lid popped loose. Two drops landed on my sleeve. I wiped them with my thumb. The train stopped between stations. An announcement cracked overhead. “We are being held momentarily by the train’s dispatcher.” I stared at the black window and felt my chest going tight again.

Okay, I got a seat on the N train, but my body never got the message that I was safe.

At 7:52, I checked Slack. Eight unread messages. Two were from my manager, sent Sunday at 9:48 p.m. and 10:03 p.m.

“Tiny thought for tomorrow.”

“No rush—Monday is fine!”

Why did “no rush” feel like a countdown?

I drafted, “Got it, I’ll update before the meeting!” Then I erased the exclamation point because it looked too eager. I put it back because the period looked hostile. I read the sentence six times, sent it, and immediately wanted to throw my phone under the train.

That notification hit me like a wall. Not because the request was cruel. It wasn’t. The change would take ten minutes, and my manager had even said there was no rush. That was the part I couldn’t even explain why: normal words were landing in my body like alarms.

A man near the door sneezed into his elbow. A child dragged one sneaker against the floor in a soft, repetitive scrape. The brakes screamed around the curve into Queensboro Plaza, and I suddenly felt trapped inside every sound.

Was I tired? Lazy? Ungrateful? Burned out? Just bad at being a person with a calendar?

I did not know. I only knew I wanted the doors to open.

9:07 a.m., Conference Room B

I badged into the Midtown office at 8:56. The security guard smiled and said, “Happy Monday!”

“You too,” I said.

But I didn’t mean it. I also did not want his Monday to be bad. See? Even my private irritation came with guilt attached.

I rushed into the bathroom, rubbed cold water over the coffee spots on my sleeve, and made them three times larger. Then I stood under the hand dryer with my arm extended while hot air pushed the stain toward my elbow. I looked like I had lost an argument with a sink.

My phone buzzed.

“Morning! You good?”

“Yep.”

“Deck ready?”

“Almost.”

“Cool, see you in two.”

I had answered “Yep” while breathing through my mouth and staring at myself under fluorescent lights. My face looked normal. That made me angry.

At 9:07, I sat in the chair closest to the door. I opened the deck. My thumb left a damp mark on the trackpad. The projector flashed blue. Someone asked for the Wi-Fi password. My manager said, “Let’s give it one more minute.” I smiled. I clicked slide one. I heard the vent rattling above me. I tasted stale coffee at the back of my throat. Slide four loaded slowly. Slide six appeared. The orange comment bubble was gone. I had fixed it. I still felt like I was about to be caught.

When my manager asked, “Can you walk us through the Friday numbers?” I knew the answer. I had pulled those numbers myself at 4:22 p.m. and checked them twice. Yet my mind went blank in a way that felt almost physical, like somebody had opened a door and all the words had rushed out.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a second to confirm the split.”

Four seconds passed.

I could hear the projector fan. I could hear somebody clicking a pen. I could hear blood beating near my ears.

“Forty-two percent came from email,” I said. “Thirty-one from paid social.”

“Perfect,” my manager replied.

Perfect? My hands were shaking under the table!

The meeting ended at 9:32. A coworker touched my shoulder near the door and said, “Nice save in there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I carried that sentence back to my desk like stolen property. Nice save suggested I had nearly dropped something. I had. No one else could see what it was.

Why did kindness make it worse?

At 10:06, I attached the wrong spreadsheet to an email sent to six coworkers. It was not confidential. It was not even old data. I had attached the July draft instead of the August version, and the file names differed by one miserable number.

I noticed twelve seconds after sending it.

“Sorry—wrong attachment. Correct file here,” I wrote.

My manager replied, “All good, happens.”

That should have released something in me. Instead, my eyes burned.

I wanted him to be annoyed so I could point at the annoyance and say, there, that’s the reason I feel bad. His kindness left me alone with the fact that no disaster had occurred. I was crushing myself under a day that had barely touched me.

At 10:41, I went into the restroom and locked the third stall. I kept my bag on my lap because the hook was loose. The citrus cleaner smelled sharp enough to taste, and somebody outside was tapping a makeup compact against the sink.

I pressed both palms against my thighs. My stomach tightened again. My chest felt suffocating, though the vent was blowing cold air onto my ankles.

I texted my friend Maya: “I think I’m having a bad Monday.”

Then I wrote, “Actually I feel like I’m drowning and I’m such a mess.”

I deleted that part.

She replied, “Want me to call?”

“No, in office. I’m okay.”

There it was again. I’m okay. I kept handing out those two words while sitting behind a locked bathroom door, trying not to make a sound.

Did I want someone to notice or did I want to disappear? Both answers felt true. That contradiction sat in my throat like a pill I could not swallow.

A woman came into the stall beside mine and unwrapped a pad. The ordinary sound snapped something in me. I remembered that I was not in a private chamber built for my breakdown; I was in an office restroom at 10:41 on a Monday, hiding while another person handled her own body three feet away.

So I waited until she left. I flushed a toilet I had not used. Then I washed my hands for too long and returned to my desk.

Lunch was four bites on West 43rd Street

At 1:17 p.m., I bought a chicken Caesar wrap and seltzer from a deli on West 43rd Street. The receipt said $13.27. I sat outside near Sixth Avenue, peeled the paper back, and took four bites while buses exhaled hot air into the curb.

My mom called.

“Did you eat?”

“I’m literally holding a wrap.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“I ate some.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that when you are not fine.”

I watched a pigeon pull a strip of lettuce from beneath the next table. My wrap tasted like cold dressing and nothing else.

My mom asked, “Is something bad happening at work?”

“No. My team is decent. My manager is decent. No one is being mean.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

I hated how lazy that answer sounded. I hated that it was honest.

I wanted a cleaner reason. A screaming boss. A missed paycheck. A 90-hour week. Something with edges. Instead, I had an air-conditioned office, a calendar full of normal meetings, and a feeling so crushing that I could barely finish lunch.

“Do you want to talk after work?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

I knew I would not call. Not because I did not love her. I just could not bear to describe the same shapeless thing twice.

At 1:26, I folded the wrap closed and threw away more than half. I felt guilty about the $13.27. Then I felt guilty that money was the part I could name.

The afternoon kept asking for tiny things

At 2:04, someone wrote, “Quick question.”

At 2:19, another message arrived: “Do you have five minutes?”

At 2:47, my calendar reminded me about a 3:00 check-in I had scheduled myself.

None of those words were threatening. My body did not care.

Each request arrived before the previous one had left my chest. I answered a message while thinking about an email while nodding during a call while watching the battery icon on my laptop turn red. I plugged in the charger and somehow felt ashamed that I had forgotten.

At 3:26, my coworker Lena stood beside my desk with her wallet.

“I’m doing a snack run. Want anything?”

“No, I’m good.”

“You sure? I’m getting those salt-and-vinegar chips.”

“I’m sure.”

I was hungry. I wanted the chips. I also could not handle making one more choice, even a choice between chips and no chips.

At 4:13, my manager asked me to switch two labels on a chart. He leaned against the divider and said, “Whenever you get a chance. Tomorrow is okay.”

“Yeah, easy,” I said.

It was easy. I changed the labels in under a minute.

Then I stared at the chart and felt tears gathering again. Okay, no one had yelled at me, but that almost made the panic meaner. I could not blame the room. I could only sit there with my damp palms and ask why one minute of work felt like another hand closing around my ankle.

I opened a blank Slack message to Maya.

“I’m such a mess,” I typed.

This time I sent it.

She replied with a single line: “I’m here.”

I left the message open on my screen for eleven minutes. I did not answer. I wanted to crawl inside those two words and shut the door, but all I could manage was a heart reaction.

“Get some rest,” he said

At 5:54, I closed my laptop. I had finished the deck, corrected the attachment, changed the labels, answered every Slack message, and added tomorrow’s meeting notes to the shared folder. On paper, I had done my job.

My manager passed my desk and said, “Good work today. Get some rest.”

“For sure,” I said.

I said it with a bright little smile that hurt my cheeks.

At 6:02, while I waited for the elevator, Slack buzzed again. The message only said, “Tomorrow, can we revisit slide eight?”

Tomorrow. Not tonight.

My heartbeat still jumped.

The elevator doors reflected me from three angles. I looked tired, but not wrecked. My hair was flat near the roots. The coffee stain had dried into a pale crescent on my sleeve. I kept thinking, Is this all anyone would see?

Outside, the heat had settled between the buildings. I walked toward the subway with my tote knocking against my hip and the same unfinished coffee sweating in my hand. I had carried it for nearly eleven hours.

I threw it away at the station entrance. The cup was still half full.

The train home did not feel like home

At 6:38, I stood on the uptown N train with one hand around the pole. My headphones were in, but I had not played anything. I could not tolerate music, a podcast, or another voice telling a story with a beginning and an end.

A couple beside me argued quietly about dinner.

“I thought you wanted tacos.”

“I said I could eat tacos.”

“That means tacos.”

“No, it means I’m flexible.”

I almost laughed. Then my throat tightened, and the laugh went nowhere.

I missed my stop at 30th Avenue because I was staring at an ad above the opposite window without reading it. When the doors closed, I saw the tiled sign slide away and whispered, “Come on.”

No one reacted.

I got off at Astoria Boulevard and walked back. Nine extra minutes. That was all. My legs felt packed with sand.

At 7:24, I opened my apartment door. My roommate was sitting cross-legged on the rug, sorting laundry into uneven piles.

“How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Fine like fine, or fine like you’re about to lie face down on the floor?”

“Floor.”

She moved a pile of towels without saying anything else.

I put my bag down and lay on the rug with my cheek against the rough fibers. I could smell dust and lavender detergent. The air conditioner rattled in the window, and somewhere upstairs, a chair scraped across wood.

I stayed there for twenty-three minutes.

10:26 p.m.

I ate leftover noodles from the container at 8:12. I stood at the counter because sitting down felt like another decision. My roommate asked if I wanted to watch an episode of something, and I said, “Not tonight.”

At 9:03, I opened my laptop again.

I had no urgent work. I knew that. I still checked the deck, reread the wrong-attachment email, and hovered over slide eight. Who was I performing for? My Slack dot was green, but nobody had asked me to be there.

At 9:19, I closed the laptop.

At 9:23, I checked Slack on my phone.

At 9:24, I hated myself for checking.

The day had been crushing without containing one grand, cinematic failure. I made the train. I attended the meeting. I answered my mom. I did the work. I came home. I ate.

And I still felt like I had spent fourteen hours swallowing water.

At 10:26, I brushed my teeth and looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. I thought about getting into bed, then waking up and doing another version of the same day. Tuesday was less than eight hours away.

I wanted Monday to end. I was scared of what came after it. Both things were true.

This is my monday drowning: no dramatic collapse, just a wet coat I cannot take off, a chest that never catches a full breath, and a clock that keeps asking me for one more thing. I am home, I am safe, and I still feel underwater.